Welcome to Carista. We are an original fantasy roleplay forum set in the world of Carista -- a place where the eight different systems of control are divided across countries and oceans and blood. The systems of control are Fire, Water, Earth, Wind, Ice, Plant, Health and Time -- all given to humanity in ages past.

Now, during a golden age throughout the kingdoms, rumors have come of the Loners discovering an ancient building deep underground that contains a legendary Relic that may hold the key to ultimate power or destruction. And so the race of kingdoms begin with the prize being a Relic of untold power...

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Errol is a tall man, standing to about 6 feet, and a solid man, with muscle to spare. He does a good amount to keep fit and actually maintain that sort of physique, which is a little more difficult at his age but he manages it. He keeps his dark hair cropped short but indulges in a carefully groomed goatee and mustache, in which he takes particular pride. His eyes are a dark, warm brown which seem almost black in most light. With an easy smile and crows feet around his eyes from laughing, he is an approachable man but certainly not one it would be wise to get on the wrong side of. The many small scars from what could be knives are a testament to that.

Personality

Personality:

Errol had it impressed upon him from a young age that he wasn't good at anything that mattered. While he has been able to grow past that for the most part, he still has moments of intense insecurity and indecision, especially associated with his element. He prefers not to practice it in front of people, to the point that many of the people he knows have to ask him what his element is. He has more confidence in things he can do with his hands, whether it be lifting and carrying or doing violence to someone. On one hand it could be said that he does not allow his element to be a crutch and instead does everything with his own two hands, but it hardly seems like a crutch when it is literally built into a person since birth. In any case, he is reticent to use it.

By nature Errol is a charming man. He can tell what you want from him and uses his personable nature to spin that so he gets what he wants from you, too. For the most part this is fairly benign: you want an ear to bend, he's more than willing to listen as long as you also mention a few key things. On occasion it may get ugly, especially if he knows the information he wants from you will put you in a bad place if anyone ever traces it back. For the most part, he uses it to stay friendly with people who aren't particularly outgoing or interested in speaking to outsiders.

His dry wit often gets him in trouble, if he doesn't keep himself in check. The less he likes a person, the more likely they are to be on the receiving end of a quick quip at their expense. Sometimes he just can't help himself and will say something even to someone he likes very much, usually with a fairly quick apology attached.

Errol believes strongly in the rebellion and puts his heart and soul into it. It is the one place he has ever truly felt he belonged and which gave a sense of purpose to his life. He trusts the other members of the rebellion and would defend any of them in a flash.

Likes:

the rebellion

It gives him a place to belong and a cause to fight for. It gives him the community he never had growing up.

hand-to-hand fighting

Errol is no martial artist, but he can more than hold his own in a fist fight. His time in the Ignis army was not entirely wasted, and he enjoys the adrenaline of a good old fashioned punch up. He also likes winning.

sex

Errol recognizes that he has a fairly fluid sexuality, but for the most part he is more attracted to women than he is men. He isn't above having a one night stand with a complete stranger, utterly content with the fact that he'll never see them again. It gets a little weird if they're someone he'll see on a daily basis, though, and as a personal rule doesn't sleep with members of the rebellion.

his brother

If there is one person he would drop the rebellion for, it would be Orson. That is unlikely to ever be asked of him, but he knows what he would do if it was.

Dislikes:

the queen & her army

After his personal experiences in it, he's not too impressed with the army. The effects of the war make him skeptical of the queen, and if you put the two things together you get a big mess of unpleasantness.

being asked to use his element

The man has a bit of a complex about it and isn't going to wade through it for just anybody.

his mother

He recognizes that she isn't technically speaking a bad person, but their views are so wildly different its different to reconcile them. Also, he's pretty sure she could have made his life a lot better by actually caring about it.

indifference

Especially in the context of the people who are still suffering after the Terran/Ignis conflict. He thinks people should care and attempt to help each other, regardless of status.

Elemental Strengths

reheating cold tea

not using his element

Not relying on his element has forced him to grow in different ways and rely more upon his physical abilities than those of his element.

Elemental Weaknesses

anything overt

not using his element

On the flip side, not using his element means it develops very slowly and he is pretty much handicapping himself next to those who use their abilities regularly, regardless of their level of power.

The marriage of Ambrose Booker to Aden Lakes was one of opposites: Aden was a women of great passions and even greater temper, while Ambrose was reserved and often mistaken as indifferent or unfeeling. While both of the Consular rank when they met, Ambrose had no desire to move higher or gain more control of his element. He was quietly contented with his place in life, with who he was as a person and the sometimes infuriating woman he had chosen to marry. He was a mathematically minded man and took care of the books for many well to-do merchants. Aden, on the other hand, was an officer in the Queen's army and devoted herself to self-improvement. Training for hours, sometimes days on end in the use of her element, she had ambitions and had trouble understanding Ambrose' lack of drive. She wanted to move up in the world, secure better positions for themselves and their children. Aden was a self-made woman, someone who came from nothing and had no intention of slowing down until she had everything.

Seeing them together at social events, even before she was an Officer, it would have been difficult to tell they had two small children at home. Orson and Errol were born fraternal twins, Errol the older of the two by almost a minute, after Aden and Ambrose had been married for two years. She was only 16 at the time of their birth and not particularly excited about the prospect of having children. Ambrose was, in his own way, but at his best he was difficult to read and at his worst he might as well have been made of metal. For their early childhood the boys spent most of their time with each other, as their mother had begun to train in earnest for joining the army and their father spent all of his time balancing books and making sure no one was stealing from the till.

Neither of the boys progressed particularly quickly in the development of their element, but Errol in particular was a late bloomer. When his mother left for the army when he was five, she went not knowing what his element was. It took him until he was nine to develop clearly into a Water system and even then he could do little more than keep dry in the rain and reheat his tea when it got cold. Orson was little better, but his Ice showed up much earlier. They spent most of their time feeling bereft, unsure of what to do with themselves. They were by no means stupid, with private tutors as far as the eye could see, but with so little affection from either parent and the clear disappointment at their lack of ability, they felt divorced from the people around them.

Several of their teachers felt compelled to try and step into a more parental role for the boys, bringing them books and toys, sweets and kind words. Ambrose kept a watchful eye on these people and was quick to dismiss them the moment he thought they overstepped their bounds. For all he was cold, he didn't want someone replacing him in his children's eyes. On occasion he managed to overcome his own emotional barriers long enough to try and connect with the boys, telling them a story from his youth or complimenting them on an exercise done well. It was clear he preferred Orson, for the element they shared, but he tried to at least be fair to both of them. In their own way the boys understood; they knew he was not a cruel man, or even an unkind one, but one that was flawed. He never shouted, threw things or snapped at them, but he would simply shut down for weeks at a time, stuck in his own head or between the pages of the ledgers he kept.

The one arena Errol excelled in was socializing. As a young man he cultivated the ability to read someone's expectations of him and play off of them. When he met an older lady who wanted a cute boy to simper and smile at her, pull out her chair and pour her a glass of wine, he obliged but with a cheeky attitude that kept it from turning into obsessive toadying. When he met a man who wanted someone to ooh and aah after his military career, he widened his eyes at all the right moments and wheedled information out of him with ease. The one thing he would not abide was someone who wanted him to be seen, not heard: these people quickly learned that the often quiet, sweet boy had a sharp wit and even sharper tongue. Those subjected to it uneasily joked that he was surely his mother's son. By this point, Aden's tireless dedication and idealism brought her to the Queen's attention and she was slowly introduced to the upper echelons of the Ignisian army. She made connections, laughed at the right jokes, and quickly found herself a Captain. It took her another seven years to make Major and another nine to make Lieutenant Colonel, at which point she began looking toward the possibility of her sons following in her footsteps. It was also the second year of the Terran/Ignis conflict and the army was pulling from anywhere they could.

Orson had taken an interest in continuing his father's business, which pleased Ambrose to no end, so the duty of entering the army fell to Errol. He was physically fit and fairly dexterous, and felt that he had something to prove, especially to his mother. They had hardly seen each other as he grew up, though she was often in the same city and even the same house. When she pulled the strings to get him a commission as a Lieutenant, he jumped at the offer and went with a sense of purpose he had rarely felt. It was quickly made clear to him that Water was much less desirable to them than Fire, and the fact that he was only an Apprentice was passable but should be changed as soon as possible. His temper and proclivity for biting comments were unwelcome in such a rank-based environment and he soon found himself a bit of a pariah. None of the officers wanted their superiors to see them talking to him, and none of the soldiers wanted to make nice with an officer who, as they saw it, had bought his way in above them without the skill to lead. Isolation was nothing new to him, though, and he threw himself wholeheartedly into the training. When they deployed his unit at the beginning of the third year of the Terran/Ignis conflict, he was one of the best hand-to-hand fighters among them and certainly the best in a straight-up bar brawl. He had also gained the dubious distinction of knife fighting like a seasoned streetman.

Unfortunately for him, the soldiers under his command had little to no respect for him and ignored him whenever possible. Orders went unfulfilled, reports were lost or left unwritten, and on occasion they literally tried to lose him. They never went so far as to attempt to do him bodily harm, as it would most likely end badly for them, several of them made it clear that they would, at the first opportunity that presented itself. They simply did not believe that he deserved to be the step above them, deciding what they did and where they went, sometimes even how they died. Over the five years he spent in the Ignisian army he came to agree with them more and more, finding himself less and less willing to make the hard calls in the name of Queen and country. He heard the way the officers spoke in their mess halls and saw the way the soldiers lived and found that he had no stomach for it. Often he would wake up in cold sweats, trying to remember why he was there and what he was doing. More than anything he wanted to remember why he was even fighting in this war.

When he was 28, near the end of the fifth year of his time in the army, he was honorably discharged after it came to his superiors attention just how little control he had over the people under his command. He had managed to gloss it over for a long time, but it was a mess and he knew it. Feeling utterly defeated, he left the camp and returned home. While he was away his father and Orson had grown even closer and the few times he saw his mother after his discharge she made it perfectly clear that he had brought her shame. She seemed almost physically ill whenever they were in the same room and it wasn't difficult for him to get the message: there is no place for you here. Every time she looked at him with disappointment he thought of what he wanted to say, all the things he wanted to explain, about how even though everything was so terrible and pointless he never once ran. He never turned his back, he never shirked his duties, he did more work than he should have needed to because no one respected him and not once did he complain or desert his post. He thought about it until his hands were fists and he vibrated with the tension of not screaming at her.

Two years after, after twenty five years of service as an officer in the Ignisian army, Aden Booker was promoted to Colonel. Her new rank meant a whole regiment of Ingisian soldiers were at her command, and her recently achieved rank of Fire Master was soon put to the test. This increased the silent conflict between herself and Errol tenfold and in the end, he decided to leave. As he was putting together his few possessions, Ambrose came through for him one last time. In one of the most lucid moments he'd ever had, perhaps in his entire life but certainly in his son's memory, he came and sat on the edge of Errol's bed and watched him pack. After several minutes, he began to tell his son the story of his life from the time he was young, all the way up until he met and married Aden. It was a fairly straightforward story but one Errol had never heard before, not in its entirety, and at the end Ambrose stood and looked him straight in the eyes. He can't remember exactly what his father said at that point, though he wishes he could, but whatever it was it was what he needed to hear. It was something about not allowing his mother to live his life and to be proud, so proud, that even though he hadn't achieved what people thought he would, it didn't mean he wouldn't still be great, in his own way. From anyone else he would have dismissed it was condescension, but he knew how much it took for his father to be standing there, looking him in the face and saying it. He left feeling lighter than he had in years.

He spent several years travelling around Ignis, seeing the effects of the war and the army as it passed through. The more he saw and heard the more he remembered the way he had felt those nights, alone in his tent, staring at the ceiling and wondering what on earth was happening. Nothing had made sense. He still had his wit, though it was certainly changed after his time in the army, and he still had some remnants of his boyhood charm. Even before the war ended he had the spark of rebellion in his eye and when rumors of a real, organized rebellion came to his ears he set out to find it. To its credit, it took him a long time to find it and quite awhile to convince them he was trustworthy, but he hasn't looked back since. Orson, the only member of his family he really keeps in contact with via letters, knows of his involvement with the rebellion and does not condone it, but would never sell is brother out.

Currently Errol is one of the strongmen of the Rebellion, the muscle behind raids on the Queen's forces and not beyond roughing up a Loyalist who found themselves alone in the wrong part of town. His rough charm affords him a place of affection among many people associated with the rebellion, and his sharp mind may yet get him higher up in the organization. As of yet he doesn't even know who officially figureheads the Rebellion and takes his orders from one or two people a few steps up from him.

OOC

RP Sample:

It was a warm evening outside Cahaya, a village seated deep in the Seran jungles; unseasonably warm, in truth. Humidity made the air thick and close, the night sticking like sap to Stian's skin as she walked, her footsteps quiet on the damp earth. Still somewhat accustomed to the weather of South Glacies, though more acclimated to temperate weather now, she still had a fairly low tolerance for heat. Her thick soled leather boots had long since been traded in for the sandals the locals wore. In all honesty she would happily have gone barefoot, but walking barefoot through an unfamiliar stretch of jungle seemed unwise, especially with all the poisonous snakes and amphibians in the area. Her cold weather clothes had likewise been exchanged for a light homespun linen tunic worn threadbare at the elbows, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Raising one arm to wipe sweat from her brow, she let her fingers probe the pins she had keeping her hair in place and off of her face, the familiar braid wound around her head in a way she had seen local women use, but didn't quite understand the mechanics of herself.

Insects swarmed around her bare arms, buzzing by her ears and trying their best to alight in Mercy's mane, which he shook fitfully every few steps. Running a slim hand down his damp neck in a calming gesture, Stian regretted bringing him for the hundredth time. She hadn't wanted to leave him behind, but jungles weren't exactly the best environment for a horse, especially one from northern Unda. He was coping admirably, but he certainly wasn't enjoying himself. Holding onto a fistful of his dirty mane for support, she glanced around herself, taking in the jungle. The well-beaten dirt beneath them was the only indication that the direction they went lead anywhere: Stian had been told that there was a town this way, one with a very wise old herb woman. Hoping to study with her, she had set off before she really understood how far it was. If she had realized she would need to walk through the night, alone in the jungle, she might have hired a guide. Or waited for the next caravan that was headed this way. No matter which way she should have done it, the current situation left her feeling exposed and unsure of how far she was from her goal.

The sky above the thick canopy of trees looked to be fading from dusky blue, a slight peach gilt to the underside of the clouds she could see between the branches. Below the canopy it was already on the verge of full night, with dregs of light filtering down from above to touch this branch or that leaf, illuminate the bole of a tree with some mysterious tangle of limbs shuffling inside. The rustling of underbrush nearby drew her dark gaze but quickly subsided. More than anything she was concerned about the large predators of the jungle, those huge cats that could sneak up behind a person with hardly a whisper. She remembered wistfully the small tribe she had met that wore masks on the backs of their heads to deter such attacks: they believed that if the cat thought they were looking at them, they would wait for an easier kill. Resisting the urge to look over her shoulder, she ran her fingers through the bit of Mercy's tangled mane in her grasp.

She had just caught site of what she believed were the outlying torches of Cahaya when Mercy stopped dead, shifting his feed nervously. Stian had learned to trust his reactions many months ago and crouched slightly, trying to spot what he had sensed. He snorted, shook his head violently and took several steps back, looking down the path ahead of them.

"What is it, darlin' boy?" Stian's voice was low and hoarse from disuse; one of Mercy's ears flicked back to acknowledge that he heard her, but his dark eyes stayed locked on the dusky trail ahead. And then she saw them, figures emerging from the underbrush ahead of her and to her right. The snap of a twig behind her made her tense, her heart pounding painfully in her throat. They were quiet, as quiet as the large cats she had feared: it had been complacent of her to forget that people were just as dangerous as animals.

The people in front of her and to her right stopped a short distance away, their faces covered by wrapped cloths. She felt the jagged tip of a weapon dig into her lower back, just hard enough to be uncomfortable but not enough to break the skin; if she could judge by what the two in front of her were holding, she assumed the third person also had a spear. Standing slowly, she kept a firm grip on Mercy's mane.

No one spoke for a long moment and Stian looked between them. Her voice still gruff fatigue, she said, "Well? What do you want?" She was in no position to fight off three people, but it didn't mean she wouldn't try. The person in front of her thrust his jaw out and pointed with his spear, toward Mercy.

"Give us your beast," the man said in lilting, musical words. Or at least that was what Stian understood of it, her Seran not being perfect, but the intent was clear. Tightening the hand on her horse into a fist, Stian shook her head, two decisive movements and then a dead stop, no room for misunderstanding.

"No." She knew her Seran was accented, she knew her complexion gave her away as a foreigner, but she most certainly was not going to give her horse over. Not only did she need him, he had become a friend to her, an amiably disinterested companion. He was certainly not going to turn into someone's dinner, as she could think of few other uses they might have for him in such a dense landscape.

There was a rumble of disapproval behind her and the spear pressed harder against her back, reminding her of exactly what the terms of this situation were. "Give us the beast, now." Taking advantage of the time it took for him to speak, Stian whirled and grabbed the spear from the masked man behind her, jerking it out of his hands and whipping it around to point at him. He took a step back, surprised, but quickly drew a thick bladed knife from his belt. His two companions began to close in, pressing the advantage of their numbers. Looking between them, Stian backed herself up against Mercy's flank and crouched lower, trying desperately to think of something clever, as her own merit as a fighter was completely negligible. As one stepped too close she snarled and lunged, missing him by a mile but making him retreat as the other stepped forward and like that, the fight began.

Alias: Saeyer

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Last edited by Errol Booker on Thu Nov 29, 2012 7:39 pm; edited 8 times in total